Chapters: A City Young and Old - The Great Indifferent City - Down at the Battery - The Church and the Street - Around City Hall Park - "Million-footed Manhattan" - Up the Bowery - Some Contrasts of the City - Among the Tenements - Tammany - City of foreigners - Two Notable Squares - Gramercy and Stuyvesant and Old Chelsea - Up Fifth to Forty-Second - Above Forty-Second - On Murray Hill - Midst Pleasures and Palaces - Superstitions of the City - Streets and Ways - Region of Riverside - To Jumep and Van Cortlandt - Hamilton and Burr - Where Many Thousands Dwell - Up the Hudson - West Point - Down the Bay - In Greenwich Village - Washington Square

Photographs: Staircase and Rotunda of the Old City Hall - The Battery - Old Trinity, far overtopped by Office Buildings - Old City Hall and Its Setting - The Sherman Statue - The Towers of Madison Square - Studio Buildings in East 19th Street - Gramercy Park and the Players Club - “The Little Church Around the Corner” - Forty-Second Street near Fifth Avenue - The Obelisk in Central Park - Classic Pillars of the Pennsylvania Station - The Lights of Broadway - The Beginning of Riverside Drive - Columbia University - The Hudson near Fort Washington - West Point and the Highlands - A Bit of Greenwich Village: Milligan Place - Washington Arch: the Gateway of Fifth Avenue

Illustrations (R.L. Boyer) : The Governor’s Room in the City Hall - Madison Square Garden - The Brooklyn Bridge - The Statue of Liberty - The Bowling Green - The Hall of Fame - Poe’s Cottage - The Old House on the Battery - Lower Manhattan - The Stock Exchange - Fraunces Tavern - St. Paul’s on Broadway - Statue of Nathan Hale - The Equitable Building - Minetta Street - Statue of Peter Cooper - The Sherman Statue - Old St. Mark’s - The Ancient Church in Eastchester - The End of 106th Street - The Cathedral of St. John the Divine - Among the Tenements: Rivington Street - Manhattan Bridge - Wall Street - The City Hall - The Shopping Stretch of Fifth Avenue - The heart of Chinatown - The Appellate Court - The Farragut Monument - Statue of Petrus Stuyvesant - The Oldest House in New York - The Old Eleventh Street Corner - The New York Public Library - St. Patrick’s Cathedral - The Metropolitan Museum - The Grand Central Terminal - On the Park Side of Fifth Avenue - Madison Square Garden - The Hispanic Museum - A Hester Street Corner - The Custom House - The Corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue - The College of the City of New York - Grant’s Tomb - The Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument - The Van Cortlandt Mansion - The Jumel Mansion - The Statue of Hamilton in Central Park - New York from the Bay - Entrance to Prospect Park - The Brooklyn Museum - Staircase in the Philipse Manor Hall - Irving’s Home, Sunnyside - The Medieval Effect of West Point - The West Point Chapel - The Old Moravian Church - Billopp House - Old Wrought-Iron Newel Posts - Corner in Old Greenwich - The Benches of Washington Square - Washington’s Words in Stone

From chapter TWO, NOTABLE SQUARES:
On the same side of the square, but in the farther corner, is Madison Square Garden, designed by Stan­ford White; but, as with everything in New York, one cannot with certainty write ‘‘is,’’ for everything that stands is but waiting the usual New York fate, and Madison Square Garden, with all its traditions of fashion and Horse Shows and great public meet­ings, is understood to be doomed. It was a superb architectural thought that put this building here, in its immense area, with its Spanish architecture and its Giralda-like tower and with so charming and graceful a Diana over all. In the towering beauty of its tawny terra-cotta and brick it is a charming thing, and its tower and its arcaded sidewalks give a distinctly foreign air. The tower was once so high, now overtopped though it is by the surrounding buildings, that from its summit the Battery could be seen. Well, changes come - and although the Battery can no longer be seen from the Diana’s tower, it may still be seen from the far loftier tower of the Metropolitan. On the same side of the square is the notable and uncompromisingly classic Madison Square Presby­terian Church, better known as “Doctor Parkhurst’s Church,’’ superbly fine, with its front a triumph of restrained color, and Pantheon-like in design. The blue in the pediment, the white of the angels, the dull-gold tops of the pillars, with blue behind, the splen­did granite shafts of the pillars, of a gray that is almost green, the apple-green overlaid with gold in the line of the eaves, the yellow and cream—yet all so quiet, so harmonious, so unobtrusive! These three great buildings on one side of the square are so important and so interesting that the eye almost fails to see the fine white building of the Appellate Court, which would attract notice in any other city. The Fifth Avenue Hotel, for so many years an im­portant center of New York life, stood facing out from the opposite side of the square, where Broad­way crosses Fifth Avenue on a long rakish angle. Long, very long, is the list of famous folk who were guests there, of the politicians who made their head­quarters there, of the notable receptions that were held there. For a quarter of a century it was pre­eminently the most prominent hotel of the city. It was in this hotel, and I mention it not so much for its importance as for its curious interest, that the minister, Burchard, made the alliterative declaration about “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” which de­feated Blame for the Presidency and elected Cleve­land. The declaration attracted no apparent atten­tion when uttered: the politicians who heard it scarcely noticed it: but the newspapers published it and it swept like wildfire through the country.

From chapter, SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CITY
New York is an exceedingly superstitious city, because of the immense medley of races in this polyglot city, with the infinite variety of superstitious traditions and ramifications brought here from every corner of the earth. In this great modern city, then, very embodiment of twentieth century progress, thrives superstition, gray with countless centuries of age. When the night wind wails through the gorgelik streets of the great East Side, thousands tremble, for the restless cry is from the souls of children un­baptized. Where thick-packed multitudes mass, many a charm is said over the sick, many a spell is mystically woven, even as spells were whispered and charms woven in the forests of Northern Europe centuries ago. Black art has not been banished by the electric light. Myths hold their own in spite of the railroad and the telegraph. Not long ago a quadroon was taken into court for preying upon the negroes of the Eighth Avenue colony. He claimed magic power, and his arrest was brought about by a woman whose son remained ill despite the virtue of three green seals and a magic belt. Recently the will of a German woman, a dweller in Stanton Street, was disputed because she had profoundly dreaded witches and had hidden throughout her clothing incantations to drive the witches away. It is seldom that the black art of Manhattan at­tracts the attention of the law. To find the terrible Slav who is in league with the devil, to find the seer who makes a child proof against poison by writing magic words, in blood, upon its forehead, to find the man who in consternation discovered skull and crossbones sewed upon his garment, to find where love-philters may be bought, with full instructions as to their administration, one must patiently come to know the mankind of the tenements. Ghosts are told of in the crowded region north of Grand Street. There are tales of demonology in Chinatown. Almshouse dwellers, sitting in the sun, watching the surging tide and the glistening water, tell of spirits and banshees and fays. Curious it is to find, in Essex or Ludlow Street or East Broadway, a belief in Lilith, the legendary first wife of Adam; but among these East Side women who pronounce incantations against her she is not Lilith as we know her in Rosetti, marvellously beau­tiful and eternally young, snaring the souls of men in the meshes of her enchanted hair, but a malicious personification of evil, forever watching to steal away or injure the new-born child. Races that never heard of the predecessor of Eve share in the fear that new-born children are liable to be stolen away; they hold that fairies are the thieves, and that in the stead of infants taken away there are changelings, children deformed, the progeny of gnomes. There are women who cruelly beat or torture the changelings that have been foisted upon them, for they hope thus to induce the child-pilferers, from very pity for the gnomish offspring, to make restitu­tion; and there is no doubt that some of the appar­ently inexplicable cases of fierce wrath toward chil­dren, on the part of sullenly reticent parents, ob­scurely root their motives in this grim belief.

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